Chiemi Karasawa's fab documentary Shoot Me--about the charmingly cantankerous ways of Broadway legend Elaine Stritch--played the Tribeca Film Festival as Stritch prepared to go bye-bye into that good night.

It's a fitting farewell, and at the after party at the Maritime Hotel's Cabanas, Chiemi gave me some of the backstory. "Was anything off-limits for Stritchie as far as filming?" I wondered. "No," said Chiemi. "The opposite! Our cameraman would say, 'Are you sure we should be filming this?' but she wanted us around to capture everything. I was going through a hard time when we made the movie," Chiemi added, "and Elaine became my confidante. We were having a relationship. She knows me as well as I know her."

So she's a maternal type? "She's a maternal type," she replied, "a sister type, a father type, a brother type, and a pain in the ass type. She feels a camraderie with women. She's done everything in spades. There's nothing you could say that would shock her. She can see things coming. I told her, 'I had to break up with my boyfriend' and she said, 'Well, we knew that was going to happen. Either the circus is in town or it isn't.'"